With no such physical blemish in the paint aging that resembled cracks in a clown’s makeup or that of a dry riverbed, the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses is a fake.
Deep analysis by scientific experts would prove the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses as an old Schuffenecker forgery (circa 1901). An X-ray would reveal that Schuffenecker didn’t draw the contours, as Vincent would have done. The “known van Gogh aid,” which the Dutch artist himself had described as a “perspective frame” in pencil, would be absent from the Met masterpiece. Would the experts find canvas pre-primed with lead white paint, another van Gogh trademark?297 And when X-rays would reveal the absence of asymmetrical weave counts—there would be nothing for the Met to hide or refute anymore.
Van Gogh Museum’s leading art expert, Louis von Tilborgh, in his 2012 study Weave Matching and Dating of Van Gogh’s Paintings, addressed the claims that van Gogh, who at times lost his faculties and could be idiosyncratic, wouldn’t have been so exact with his materials, such as the special paints and canvases. As Tilborgh et al. noted: “Thanks to the correspondence we simply know more about the way he worked with his painting materials than about almost any other artist of his period, although that mainly applies to the years 1888–90.”298 Van Gogh remained precise and kept track of what he used.
Finally, during a November 2013 interview, former FBI special agent and founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Unit Robert Wittman weighed in on what would be, for him, the unequivocal proof that the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses is a fake van Gogh. He pointed specifically to the material characteristics of the painting. Knowing that the picture was painted outdoors in June 1889 leads one to expect that there would have been pollen or dirt in the paint.
Wittman added, “Paint chip analysis, if it doesn’t detect pollen, then it’s a clear fake. That would be definitive,” since the landscape would be shown to have been painted indoors as opposed to being outside, in front of his subject, as van Gogh did with his sketch and then detail drawing of Wheat Field with Cypresses in June 1889.
Unfortunately, such an analysis is not an option, outside of attempting to steal a chip of paint off the painting inside the Met. (The thought has crossed this author’s mind.) Regardless, the overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to their picture being painted by another hand, that belonging to Schuffenecker.
27
Failing van Gogh
“Where do I start?” I asked an exasperated Susan Alyson Stein. It was the second time she had called that Monday after the Fourth of July weekend in 2013. Monday is the one day of the week the Metropolitan Museum of Art is closed.
Stein, a middle-aged, well-educated woman with short, spiky raven-black hair and a narrow face made narrower by small wire-framed glasses, was the curator of nineteenth-century European art at the Metropolitan Museum.
To her credit, “Susie” Stein rushed back from her vacation on the east end of Long Island to deal with the questions I raised on the questionable authenticity of a major van Gogh. She came back to the city to answer a detailed email I had sent to the museum’s press office the day before the holiday.
The email stated that I had evidence—albeit circumstantial—there was a suspected fake van Gogh painting hanging in the museum. It wasn’t any painting, mind you, that was in question, but the Met’s ultimate prized acquisition.
In 2013, Gary Tinterow was the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. I reached out to Mr. Tinterow to comment on the broken provenance of the Met’s painting. I received a reply from his assistant Mary Haus by email: “I forwarded your query to Gary Tinterow; he requested that you direct your inquiries instead to the Metropolitan, as he is no longer with the Met.”
Nice dodge, I thought.
Alas, it turned out, Susan Stein wasn’t actually in the mood to answer questions—certainly not from me. No way. She wanted to “enlighten” this reporter. So instead of reviewing the PowerPoint I had sent her, showing the six points of dissimilarity—which would grow to two dozen points—between two identical van Gogh landscapes, both purportedly painted in the same summer of 1889 at the Saint-Rémy asylum, Ms. Stein felt the need to educate me on the complexities of van Gogh’s art.
What could I possibly know about Vincent van Gogh? I did disclose that he was my “favorite” artist, going back twenty-five years to when I lived and worked in Philadelphia in that watershed year of 1987, when Impressionist art sales blew through the stratosphere, forever in a new orbit and remaining a key investment today for billionaires.
Having visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art—a good place to take a date—and the magnificent Barnes Collection of Impressionist art frequently, I dove deep into the world and brushstrokes of van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin, and many others. Back then, all of the paintings in the Barnes Collection were crammed—an ensemble—onto the walls and halls of its mansion off City Line Avenue. The artwork housed several van Goghs, including a couple from the Saint-Rémy period, along with other European artists.
Susan, just go over each point I sent you and answer them one by one. That would be the logical way to proceed, I thought.
Susan Stein had other ideas, so she wanted to address other matters, like the pronunciation of Saint-Rémy.
But I, James Ottar Grundvig, am stubborn, like the Norse fjords carved in granite that are part of my roots. I am persistent to a fault. It comes in handy when facing an adversary such as Ms. Stein. So I pushed back, telling her, “The museum was built for people like me, the common folk, and not for the elite like you.”
“I agree. We are a public institution—that’s why I came to the museum today to respond to your email,” she said. And yet the Met doesn’t consider itself a public institution when having to answer to a FOIA letter request. Stein went on to suggest that instead of chasing answers or “go fishing” for a fake van Gogh, I should travel to Europe and meet with van Gogh experts and enjoy the scenery.
“I did,” I claimed. “I interviewed one of the leading van Gogh experts in the world—Louis van Tilborgh at the Van Gogh Museum in Holland. You have heard of him, haven’t you?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Why don’t you answer the six points I sent you on Wheat Field with Cypresses?”
“Our Wheat Field was painted late June, early July in 1889,” she stated.
“What about the A Wheatfield, with Cypresses painting in the UK National Gallery of Art in London? That work was painted in September as written in Vincent’s letter,” I continued.
“That one was a copy of ours that Vincent did,” she claimed.
Not believing her for a second, I forged on, stating, “Both paintings have the same exact cloud formation. They have the same secondary image embedded in the same cloud, the same shading, and the same yellow-brown wheat field. They can’t have been painted a season apart given the similarity of all these characteristics. The color of your wheat field shows harvest season, which is in the fall. I know that because my father grew up on a farm in Norway.”
I noted that at the start of late June the wheat field at Saint-Rémy would have been green, as the Green Wheat Field with Cypresses painting in Prague attests to, along with another wheat field painting called After the Storm that was mentioned in Vincent’s letter of June 9, 1889. If those two paintings of wheat fields are deep green with the spring rains of June, then why is the Met’s version the amber-brown of autumn?
Not wanting to be specific in either of those two phone calls that day or in email, Stein moved on, holding the line that the UK Wheat Field—sometimes referred to as Cornfield—was a copy (Final version) done by van Gogh of the Met’s original painting (claimed First version). Not likely. (In fact, according to the National Gallery’s own Technical Bulletin, its picture is the Final version painted from a previous study. No copy, but the best and final version of three.)
I pointed out, “You have some other problems with your painting. There’s the Green Wheat Field with Cypresses in the Narodni Galerie in Prague
.” Ms. Stein knew of it. “That painting,” I continued, “with its ‘blue’ and ‘multicolored Scottish plaid’ sky resembles the July 2, 1889, passage Vincent wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, and not the gray, cloud-covered sky in your painting.”
During the phone call, I too had attributed that very specific line from the van Gogh letter to the wrong painting. I would come to learn that my simple, non-art expert mistake was right on the hunch but wrong on the painting. Two years later, I would discover that the “multicolored Scottish plaid” was a reference to another of the Met’s van Gogh painting, the vertical Cypresses.
“There are three Wheat Fields. We have one of them,” she insisted.
But that conversation was in 2013. Now, with the deep-dive investigation complete, we learned several things that apparently the experts at the Met, from Gary Tinterow in the 1990s to Susie Alyson Stein in the twenty-first century, didn’t know or uncover.
We know two of the van Goghs, including Wheat Field, traveled with Dr. Peter Witt, who sold them to Emil G. Bührle in 1951 in a deal brokered by Dr. Fritz Nathan.
Dr. Schoeps wrote about the suspect van Gogh painting in his 2009 German-language book The Heritage of the Mendelssohns and knew the Met version was a painting with “shaky provenance.”
When addressing the possibility of the Met’s Wheat Field not being painted in June 1889, Ms. Stein asked, “So what happened to the other one?”
It didn’t get lost during either of the two world wars. Emile Schuffenecker manufactured it just before or right after the 1901 Bernheim-Jeune van Gogh retrospective exhibition.
So this leads to a compelling question for the Metropolitan Museum: Is the painting worth tens of millions of dollars, the $57 million price tag from two decades ago adjusted for inflation to an estimated value of $95 million in 2016?
Or did the Swiss arms dealer’s son, Dieter Bührle, dump the fake on the Met knowing full well he could never sell it at auction, as there would be no takers once the painting was thoroughly vetted by forensic science, chemical analysis, X-rays, and a team of experts, as was done with the Final version of the original painting in the National Gallery in 1987?
Is the Met’s version only worth the cost of materials, canvas and stretchers, brushes and paints, and the labor it took Claude-Emil Schuffenecker to make the knockoff copy?
During the second phone call with Ms. Stein that day, I asked her if I could see a copy of the Wheat Field with Cypresses condition report. She responded “No,” adding, “I don’t know which curator has the condition report. But they are away on summer vacation.”
I would later discover that the curator who wrote the latest version of the condition report at the Met was Charlotte Hale in 2006. Susan Alyson Stein notes that in her book Masters of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection.
“I did ask specific questions earlier today on whether the Met has done any modern-day testing with X-rays and other technology, like the museums in Europe have done,” I reminded her.
“You can find the answer to that in the footnotes I sent you earlier on the book that I edited,” she replied.
The irony is that this book, which is sold in the Metropolitan Museum’s store and online, has the Wheat Field with Cypresses on its cover. Yes, just like The Passionate Eye brochure, which lured the big-whale art collector Walter Annenberg to step into the honey trap and acquire the painting for the Met. Of all the thousands of paintings done by the “eighteen master artists” profiled in The Annenberg Collection book, she put the fake on the cover.
Confounding.
What Susan Stein and the Met don’t realize is that the world has since changed. Thanks to big data, cloud analytics, and other technologies, we live, work, and operate in an open-source, shared-economy, transparent society of the twenty-first century. The new generation of millennials, who continue to enter the work force, have a different view on secrecy, opacity, and deception.
Open source means the average person has free access to all of the van Gogh letters in the online searchable database, as well as the use of Google Images to examine close-ups of a painting in great detail in high-definition images, or Google Earth to zoom down on the asylum as it still stands today and see Vincent’s wheat field, which has been replaced with grass and some trees, and the Alpilles mountain range to the south still visible to the southeast along the way the morning sun shines on the mountains in summer.
Vincent van Gogh will live forever.
Do you hear that, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker?
Do you hear that, Emil Bührle?
Van Gogh’s paintings will be transferred from one owner to the next, from the dead to the living, from parent collector to an heir or a donation to a museum. Van Gogh will live on far into the future, to be experienced by new ardent fans and curious people who will wonder what made him great and why his iconic bright, dazzling colors and brushstrokes were so unique to him and special to all of us.
Long live Vincent van Gogh.
IV
THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY
28
Van Gogh’s Fragmented Oeuvre
The forgers who fenced dozens of paintings through the once-venerable Knoedler Gallery, established in the nineteenth century, could only commit their crime knowing that artists such as Rothko, Pollock, and Motherwell had been dead a long time. When we see the profits one stands to reap—“Preet Bharara’s office indicted Ms. Rosales on being the front for the paintings that were sold to Knoedler Gallery for more than $30 million, and then flipped for $80 million to wealthy investors”299—we can understand why people of all stripes forge paintings. This particular series of crimes started in the mid-1990s and went well into the twenty-first century, before Getty, the owner of the gallery, pulled the plug on the historic gallery. Before that happened, however, “the profits were huge. In total, 63 fake paintings were listed as produced and laundered. They included iconic names of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, but they had an ‘odious’ air about them.”300
The August 2013 article this author wrote on that art-crime conspiracy explains the mindset of the thief: “For art forgery to work, the artist must be dead so he can’t spot a fake. Take the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, who died in 1956. Last year, the Knoedler Gallery was shut down for having a ‘forged’ Pollock. There’s one problem with copying his work. Pollock used lead-based paints that were banned in the 1970s.
“Another problem with Pollock: ‘The whites are no longer whites, they are now yellow, due to aging,’ said a top art restorer and a watchdog to the New York City auction houses when I met him at his studio. ‘There are two ways to detect fakes. The good ones can spot the odious crap right away. If it’s a period piece, you flip over the painting and check the frame and canvas to see if it’s an original from that time period,’ he explained.”301
At the start of the twentieth century, doubts began arising about suspect van Goghs that had moved beyond a single fake, or even two or three. The question grew with time. In 1997, an article came out claiming that there could be as many as one hundred fake van Goghs, with at least “forty-five doubted in the canonical Hulsker catalogue, sixteen are in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; leading scholars Dorn and Feilchenfeldt consider another twenty-one dubious, and there is skepticism also about some drawings. But there is good news as well: over the last ten years, twelve new works have been accepted as being by Van Gogh.”302
Talk about a broken oeuvre from a major artist. One hundred fakes? Mon dieu! Even if the number were whittled down to forty-five fakes, the van Gogh controversy is clearly alive and well more than a century after his death.
But instead of going to bat and trying to hit a home run, why not try to hit a single, as in a single fake? More startling than the number of fake van Goghs in the market is that this particular one, the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses, has never shown up on any of those fake-forged-Schuffenecker lists. It’s an outlier. It is also a clear fake. A butch
ered copy. So if that painting has never been examined as one of the dozen or more suspect fakes by the art experts that came before this book, what does that say about Vincent’s true oeuvre?
Let’s start with what we do know about which van Goghs are true van Nogh paintings.
1901—Julien Leclercq removes two van Goghs from the seventy-one paintings that were exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery on day one of the show, making a nice diversionary tactic to get Jo van Gogh-Bonger to look in another direction.
1932—Then there were the four confirmed fakes in the Otto Wacker Trial, which didn’t turn up the weave count issue then, but have been confirmed by modern X-rays for one of them. In his miraculously discovered trove from a “secret” Swiss collector, how many of the thirty-three paintings are actually van Noghs?
2000—Maria-Claude Corbeil, a chemist at the Canadian Conservation Institute of Ottawa, proves through deep X-rays that the weave counts were not asymmetrical for painting Cypresses (different than the Met’s original), which has a provenance that ran through convicted art forger Otto Wacker.
2014—Swiss investigative journalist Hanspeter Born and French art expert Benoit Landais dismantle the Yasuda Sunflowers in their thoroughly researched book Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers, proving beyond a doubt it was forged by the minor artist in 1901.
2014—Not to be outdone by their own work, Born and Landais make another strong case in their book by looking at another Met van Gogh; this time they examine L’Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux with Books; the authors show that Madame’s elbow is floating above the table, not resting on it as it does in the real painting with nearly the same name, L’Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux with Gloves and Umbrella, which hangs in Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Breaking van Gogh Page 20